Former national security adviser Jake Sullivan backed his former boss — President Joe Biden, whose mental acuity is being reexamined in light of revelations in a new book — with Sullivan saying he was stunned by Biden’s poor debate performance last year.
“It was, what happened in that debate was a shock to me,” Sullivan told Playbook’s Jack Blanchard at POLITICO’s Security Summit on Thursday. “I think it was a shock to everybody.”
Sullivan’s defense of Biden comes as new details emerge on the growing concern from outside and within the Biden administration on his age and mental capacity to execute his role.
Sullivan, however, said that everything he saw from Biden throughout his tenure was “a commander in chief doing his job.”
“I sat with President Biden in the Oval Office, I sat with him in the situation room, from the beginning of my time to the end of my time,” Sullivan said. “I saw him operating, decision making, executing as commander in chief during all that time.”
The concerns over Biden’s reported mental and physical deterioration marked a key pain point for the Democratic campaign in 2024, with a former adviser for former Vice President Kamala Harris saying that Biden’s age screwed her campaign. The details over the unease on Biden’s mental sharpness in 2024 are trickling out in excerpts of a new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson — “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
In the book, Tapper and Thompson report that Biden forgot Sullivan’s name during an interaction in December of 2022, where Biden accidentally called him “Steve.”
“I do not recall that ever happening,” Sullivan said when asked about the interaction, “and I will tell you, Joe Biden knows my name.”
A spokesperson for Biden did not immediately respond to request for comment.
When asked about the Cabinet secretaries and White House staff (over 200 of them) who shared their concerns in the new book, Sullivan said he couldn’t speak to anyone else’s experience, while defending Biden as a capable and active president.
Sullivan also did not directly answer whether or not he believed Biden should have run for reelection in 2024, saying his role as national security adviser kept him “mercifully insulated” from national politics.
“I have not weighed in on those issues and would not weigh in on those issues,” Sullivan added.
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